Don't Die
In a world for swans, here is why cockroaches win.
Most of us are optimizing for the wrong thing.
Last week I wrote about running the Chicago Marathon on a fractured tibia. The experience was a deep learning moment, but the real insight came after → Not stopping.
Any reasonable person would have called it and found a different hobby. I didn’t. Not out of toughness. Not because I loved running that much. I just kept not dying.
And that was the whole secret to becoming a professional marathon runner later.
If you want to run a sub-3 marathon, you don’t need a perfect training plan. You don’t need the best shoes or a Strava coach. You need to not die. Don’t get a catastrophic injury. Don’t lose motivation. Don’t get distracted chasing three different goals at once.
Don’t die for two or three years, and I guarantee you can qualify for Boston or any other race that matters.
Most runners never find out because they don’t survive long enough to see it.
When It Gets Real
A few weeks ago, at a leadership offsite, Ricardo Amper, the founder of Incode (an AI-powered identity unicorn), said something that stayed with me.
The startup game is like musical chairs. The music plays. Everyone’s moving. It stops, and there are fewer chairs than people. If you are left standing, you’re out. Doesn’t matter how smart you are. If the fundraising window closes without you, the game is over.
His point wasn’t about winning in the short term. It was about always having a chair and having one more chance.
The founders who survive multiple funding cycles, multiple downturns, multiple moments where the company almost didn’t make it, they’re not always the smartest in the room. They’re the cockroaches that don’t die.
The ones who quit in year two never find out what year four would have looked like.
Most founders optimize for growth. For the metrics that look good in a pitch. The real optimization target is survival. Infinite survival. Don’t die. The rest figures itself out.
Lesson Learned: Survival isn’t the consolation prize. It’s the strategy. Compounding only works if you’re still there when it kicks in.
Worth Your Time
Paul Graham published an essay simply titled “How Not to Die.” He wrote it for YC founders but it reads like a running manifesto. His argument: most startups that fail didn’t get beaten. They just stopped. If you solve the problem of not dying, everything else becomes a question of time.
In 2019 I was rolling through downtown Chicago in a wheelchair after the Marathon with a fractured tibia. Three years later, I ran a 2:38 in Boston. The only thing that happened in between was not dying.
Thanks for reading.
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